Now he belongs to the elite.
Like a photo workshop, even the trying decline of the citizenship (belonging to the working and lower middle classes) of stigma and the super-rise of discrimination amongst the mentally ill has myths and attitudes. It has become kind of like an occupational hazard that swings black veins here to know and understand this ‘captive-apartheid’ (separate but equal mentality, this psyche) of what it is like to be mentally ill, to be hospitalised, institutionalised on a long-term basis, the conflict in the home that leads to isolation, withdrawal from the community and broader society of the ‘victim’. In the discontent, in anger and agony, there will be violence and assault against the mentally ill that is never spoken about. There will never be an apology. The arrogant and thoughtless perpetrators from all quarters would think that with time memories of the past injustices and brutality will fade like a season. That the mentally ill sufferer would forget the pain of the mental cruelty of the emotional abuser. I think that we are all victims. All artists become victims. The dysfunctional household, the nuclear family hanging on by a thread becomes anti-powerful, antisocial, and rather than address these questionable and brutal actions, this avalanche of sin against the creative-minded and imaginative bipolar sufferer, or, the mentally ill sufferer who has an artistic temperament the result can lead to the dynamic of social alienation from society. The artist may be seen as a deteriorating misfit and living in declining living standards. Having a low sense of self-worth, no identity to speak of, or, frequently in the mode of identity crisis.
Frequenting brothels, becoming hypersexualised, or, befriending people living on the fringes of society. Cast out of society, Vincent called upon interlopers like himself, marginalised, disadvantaged due to poverty, neglect, and abandonment, and the liberties of discrimination. I have spoken about the spoiled identity before. I am more moved now to write about how the socialisation of discrimination against the mentally ill sufferer came about, than press-ganged stigma. There is a different mode of operandi for both. Like the Dutch painter, I tried to outrun the dawn, befriend the working class, those living and working in poverty, those gone in a drink, but the world has become a sticky place. Vincent held up a paintbrush and it became an alpha and omega talisman in his hands. He never sold a painting in his lifetime, had experienced unrequited love in his life, lived in abject poverty, befriended and even painted his circle of confidantes, prostitutes. He painted the wilderness in a chair, he painted the bone-filled face of the moon, he painted portraits in which he portrayed both the androgynous effect of the mind and the male and female landscape there, he painted self-portraits displaying his nature, his a-typical personality for the entire world to see, and he painted sunflowers. He engineered grasses, torment (even in the stars), the genius in the mundane, the banal. Even in the mediocre he found light and improvised comfort for himself in that light as if it belonged to the arena of God. He found the heart and the liver in the shadow of the destitute weeping over the figure of Christ, and for me, there’s a vague anguish attached to the scale of the page.
I think that when Vincent was painting himself, these complex pictures were so layered with subtext, so conceptual, yet, the broken link was there all along. The psychology of it all. And in extremes magical, in bursts of creative thought with an almost unreal substance sticking to it as if mentally he was getting rid of things that had robbed him of life. Marriage, children, ‘the’ career and a loving wife. When I look at the depressed views of himself, the imaginative portraiture, of course, of course I see myself. I see my own writing. I see myself as a poet, second and novelist, first in this phase of my writing career. Not confident in his talent, or, sure, is this a gift. His work was not ‘art’ in a commercial sensibility that would see him gaining financial security from his monumentally gifted work in his lifetime.Vincent’s nightmares like mine must have been intense and terrifying. I journal, Vincent painted. I didn’t handle my nervous breakdown every well, and subsequent nervous breakdowns, and hospitalisations. Stress, burnt out, depression and mania. Both common in the artistic temperament as well as female poets suffering from the Sylvia Plath Effect. He knew the business of internalising emptiness, the nonconcrete, turning it into the uninvolved non-event of the morose state of affairs of both affective pressure and fatalistic depression. I concentrate on the good things.He was a Renaissance-wolf. Hanging on by a phantom thread (as is due to artists who are mentally ill).He knew the voracious destructive pain of being rejected, that matters of the heart have two definitions.To be loved in return, or, to remain single, unloved.
And have many love affairs always trying to make up for the one that you lost to another. He plugged the gaps with the divine, albeit psychological art. In a South African, African context, the artist should be an enfranchised individual. It is important to realise that not just as newspaper gospel, but as a universal challenge, and as truth. The climate of freedom comes to the enfranchised. A kind of innermost peace in the lonely nights. Where did the origins of Vincent’s art, his utter focus, the language of his concentration, the fact that he was so prolific, as hardworking as spit come from, from childhood, or, from a psychiatric disorder? I have struggled with this realisation for most of my adult life. What does every bold incident of trauma inspire in the ‘disaster’ artist? The sunflowers of the creative spark, or, the madness life in the very ill.In the end, ultimately Vincent was the winner. He was the heir to whom the voice of God belonged to in his own time. I see his work speaking to me as diagrammatic. As a photo ark speaking in hundreds of tongues.What is writing, writing for pleasure, what exactly does that mean? What is painting, where is the voice in the painting, to whom does that voice belong? To me, truth resides in the forms of succession (what is the reward for the artist, what is the hereafter and the aftermath). By design the boiling kettleof the psyche brings to life the work, the vision, the art. Where dawn meets nightfall, the music of the hours, the silence by the beach with sand, the knot on the counter top, the muted television, the lost television remote, posterity and legacy, immortality and the mortal; the intellect is the master.
I think ofthe light in the fridge. How for me it can sometimes illuminate, radiate, light up the entire phenomenological plan of the order of this planet, of what I am writing, but the question begs, does the artist have an ego, is it unfulfilled, is it more mythic embryo than the odyssey in the womb. What is talent, that seems to come so naturally for the chosen, or, plays out as dubious and unnatural for the audience. Can the negative, can depression fuel, and nurture art?There is both affected dark in that supremacy, and light.
And of damage, of the photograph album of the soul rising to the surface; art too can heal, and can be a blessing. Yes, yes, the misfit can heal, and can be a blessing. We need not only look at Vincent van Gogh as a Dutch painter who never sold a painting in his lifetime, we can look to Africa’s nonconformist artists (Dambudzo Marechera, Richard Rive for example), and we can look to the universality of the world. Look upon the broken link to find the livid owl. Look upon the psychological education of the artist from childhood to death.
